ChatGPT is the latest iteration of OpenAI, one the leading artificial intelligence tools that will essentially generate anything you ask it to. It’s been around for a while, but 2023 is the year teachers have woken up to its potential.
Until now, I’ve been primarily using AI to create visual stimuli for specific tasks. In effect, I have found it easier and faster to generate the images in my mind to stimulate writing or illustrate handouts than to scroll through Google Images for their likeness. ChatGPT does the same for text. If you can type it, ChatGPT can probably type it for you – smarter and faster, albeit with fewer personal touches.
So, egged on by all the media attention, I decided to recruit the software to help me with my biggest bugbear: Fear Of The Empty Lesson Plan Template. I asked ChatGPT to plan three lessons, gave it the criteria and a rough lesson layout, and was astounded by how quickly and well it managed to produce a bare-bones lesson plan unit.
When I shared the results on Twitter, it’s fair to say it blew up, beating my “show your cat socially distancing” tweet of 2020 by some margin. Most comments recognised that it could immediately be a force for good, saving hours, but others pointed out three areas of concern.
The robots are coming for our jobs
Some saw this as the final nail in the profession’s coffin. Others derided the plans themselves. Congratulations to both groups for missing the point. Just as a Nigella recipe can result in carnage in my kitchen, these plans can be brilliant on paper and totally ineffective in the classroom. They can also be bad, but easier to improve on than to create from scratch.
The point is that we can’t complain about workload and resist a dumb tool that offers to remove a lot of the grunt work. Try it. Your jaw will drop. Paste in a story and ask it to write six VIPER questions about it or ask it to write a parent letter about next week’s cake sale. It can do all of that and more, and do it effectively given the correct inputs.
The end of assessment as we know it
Imagine this terrifying scenario: Teacher uses AI to generate question; students use AI to generate answers; teacher uses AI to mark answers.
Nightmarish, right? Also unlikely at this point. Regardless, further and higher education settings are already exploring the “Milestones” model, whereby versions of an assignment are handed in or evidence of a development are submitted. If you use Google Drive, this is already baked in with “previous versions”. Cheating adapts. So does assessment.
‘Danger panic’
“This Bad Thing will make teachers lazy, so we must ban or block it.” I’d humbly suggest leaders who are considering doing this test it out for themselves first and see what workload it can relieve for them. Their hourly rate is greater, and I can’t imagine any headteacher applied for the role hoping to spend hours writing administrative documents.
Imagine what teachers could do if they spent less time at their laptops, or how they might feel with some of their evenings and weekends back.
Top tips
For image generating, the two frontrunners are DALL-E and Midjourney. Midjourney is the better of the two overall, but appallingly designed and not for the Discord-uninitiated.
The power of AI lies in input so be as specific as possible with requests, including word limits, key words and what to avoid.
ChatGPT is designed for your enquiry to be the basis of a conversation, so ask follow-up questions. Could you add more detail to the third paragraph? Can you turn those ideas into a bulleted list? Can you generate more challenges to that concept?
I’d share more, but why bother? Just get ChatGPT to fill in the gaps.
Your thoughts